The exemplary embodiment relates to contextualizing information for a device and finds particular application in troubleshooting problems and for maintenance of an electromechanical device, such as a printer.
Operational procedures, such as maintenance and troubleshooting procedures for devices, are usually provided to customers in a technical manual in the form of paper or digital documentation. When a user of the device wishes to identify the cause of a problem with the device or perform maintenance, the documentation is reviewed to find relevant information on the procedures which should be performed on the device. This type of user support suffers several limitations. For example, it may not always be available or accessible at the device. Another problem is that the documentation is often primarily textual, using terminology which is often not in common usage. The documentation may use generic descriptions which allow the procedures to be applicable to a range of devices within a family. An effort of interpretation is thus required in order to apply the procedure to the actual device. Additionally, the instructions are not aware of the current state of the device, for example whether a door is currently open or closed. These difficulties may in many cases prevent or at least slow down the application of the instructions from such manuals.
Documentation is now often in digital rather than paper form, allowing graphical and sometimes animated illustrations of the procedures. However, the procedures are still described for a type of device and are not contextualized to the specific instance of the device to be operated and to its specific configuration and status at the time of the performance of the operation. An effort of translation of the procedure to the specific context of application still remains, irrespective of the quality of the description.
An alternative to the technical manuals often used by product manufacturers is to embed some contextual instructions within the display of the device. These instructions are usually triggered when a particular status of the device is reached and are intended to guide the user in a step-by-step process for solving the issue. For example, when a printer suffers a paper jam, sensors may detect where the paper jam has occurred, triggering the display of jam clearance instructions. However, these contextual instructions are usually limited to few well-known and simple issues and are often provided with little detail, as compared to technical manuals. This is because these instructions tend to be costly to implement and are often limited to normal maintenance operations that are known at the time the device is engineered.
There remains a need for a system and method for assisting device users in performing operations on the device through contextualized device operating instructions.